Monday, 17 August 2015

Loan a gunman? The Parallax View (1974)

Warren Beatty

What’s the link between the Kennedy Assassination and
Thor God of Thunder?

Writer Alan Moore once described superheroes as revenge
fantasies for the impotent and here Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s creation is used
as part of a visual conditioning process for potential assassins. Multiple
images flash on the screen following words like Father, Love, Country and Enemy.
At first the images are pleasant ones but they gradually become more graphic
and disturbing as the positive words are mixed with negative images and the God
of Thunder makes increasingly frequent appearances: urging the watcher to be
your own hero and to take action.

Positive...

Negative

It’s a remarkable sequence some minutes long and must be
quite disorientating in cinema, as the watchers of the watcher are subjected to
the visceral impact of so much conflicting stimuli over such a short period
time: agitation and disruption to a murderous degree.

Infiltration and revenge...

At a time of so much deliberate super heroic audience
stimuli this connection seems even more sinister: customer conditioning for
economic gain which some take too far. In The
Parallax View it’s a means of tapping into people’s inner psychotic;
inducing a revenger-rage string enough for them to kill selected targets that
they can be persuaded are attacking with American values.

But the organisation running this process isn’t
necessarily political – they will rent out their lone gunmen for hire to the
highest bidder: capitalism in action a practical solution provider for power
struggles across the political spectrum their targets never clearly identified
as democrat or republican.

Hume Cronyn and Warren Beatty

Director Alan J. Pakula is careful not to present his
main character as a straightforward hero;Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty) is a journalist driven by his own ego
perhaps but he doesn’t want a Pulitzer; just the truth. A reformed alcoholic he
has obviously struggled to conform but follows his instincts.

Beatty plays Frady with narrow-band emoting and whilst
this adds to the relentlessnarrative
drive it doesn’t give us much time to examine the man: there are no extended
bedside sequences and the only relationship Frady can just about sustain is
with his long-suffering editor.

The dam blows... as does the boat.

Frady can handle himself, besting a corrupt cop in a
lengthy bar brawl, out-lasting another as a dam burst flood carries them down a
ravine and even preventing a bomb destroying an aircraft. Tellingly, when the
bomb does explode on the empty grounded plane, Pakula doesn’t show it – we just
hear it.

Pakula’s action is almost this incidental and the superb
cinematography of Gordon Willis plays a major part in setting the characters
against pre-dominant exterior locations – the Seattle space needle, concrete
cityscapes and huge assembly halls. It’s as if the action is almost buried by
reality as if the audience could see it outside the theatre if they looked long
and hard enough. Frady’s conversation with his editor Bill Rintels (Hume
Cronyn) often start with lengthy shots of Bill’s office, stuck in the corner of
the newspaper’s news desk like an Edmund Hoper night scene, two figures
dimly-lit and, literally, part of a bigger picture.

Paula Prentiss

The film starts off with cinéma vérité news reporting of
a senator’s visit to the Space Needle. Paula Prentiss plays Lee Carter a nervy
news reporter covering the event and interviewing the senator’s slick aide
Austin Tucker (William Daniels). The action moves to the Needle where Frady
tries to blag his way into the party by claiming he’s with Lee but she denies
the link even though her interest is piqued by his audacity and well-maintained
hair.

The meet and greet that follows is almost matter of fact
and Pakula lulls his audience into a false sense of security almost tot eh last
seconds before the assassin strikes. The killing is seen behind the glass as
Lee talks further with Tucker. There’s a desperate scramble as security chase
down the killer who eventually falls to his death… he clearly wasn’t acting
alone but no one else sees that.

There follows an audacious shot of the official panel
reporting their conclusions – they are shown in long shot un-touchable and –
literally – unquestionable: this is a statement and not a Q&A.

Lee looks for help...

A few years pass, and Lee appears at Frady’s apartment: by
now former lovers, he obviously couldn’t commit to her anxious nature. Now
she’s frightened for her life and claiming that six of those present at the
assassination have now died under mysterious circumstances. Frady dismisses
this – he’s given up his own conspiracy investigation – and tries to re-assure
Lee. Cut to Lee’s body in the morgue as Frady realises that something is indeed
afoot.

He starts to investigate – in spite of his editor’s long-suffering
indifference and gains valuable evidence from a corrupt Sherriff (Kelly
Thorsden) which points to a company called Parallax and a psychometric test he
learns is designed to identify potential psychotics.

With help he fakes appropriate results and proceeds to
infiltrate Parallax… but this is a deadly game and the conspiracy runs deep.

Dusty Verdict:The
Parallax View epitomises the paranoia of the time and, indeed, modern
cinema – the difference being that Pakula and others actually hoped something
could be done… and they were certainly angry and not resigned. This was
something new – post noir betrayals – rather than a simple plot device.

Warren Beatty is superbly controlled and leads an
excellent cast whilst Pakula directs with the same assurance he demonstrated in
1971’s Klute. The Parallax View’s reputation seems to grow with every passing
year and it will do until we can be sure that we’re not just paranoid and that,
yes, they really are out to get us.